Tall

America’s greatest contributions to world civilization are jazz, baseball, the musical—and the skyscraper. Using vintage postcards, photographs, and architectural renderings, filmmaker Manfred Kirchheimer offers a lively account of the rise of this technological and aesthetic wonder in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, focusing on various modernist architects efforts to evoke the power, wealth, and progress of a newly ascendant nation in iron and steel, glass and stone.

Filmmaker Manfred Kirchheimer traces the experiments of the early skyscraper architects, especially Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who pioneered a new skyscraper form.